chelseagirl

I'm not teaching 'til tonight (yay -- my class starts at 7, just when the big storm is supposed to hit . . . ), and M. is working days, so I'm working at home, which right now seems to mean doing laundry and catching up on LJ. Soon it will mean returning to More's Utopia, however . . .

One of my students asked me what my political leanings were after yesterday's discussion of More. I asked him what he thought. He said, "left-leaning?" I said yes, that most academics were, otherwise we'd be on Wall Street earning actual money. He laughed. No doubt he is right-leaning or he wouldn't have felt moved to ask, so I made it clear that I *didn't* want students to think they had to conform their opinions to mine, especially since there is so much political theory in this course.

The Scarlet Letter just -- no. I didn't like it when I was younger and I wondered if I might appreciate it better after an interval of years; Nope. Horrid book. I'm doing that with the continuing ed class tonight. If Hawthorne uses one more !!!!!, I'm going to dig up his grave myself. And how many times can you say "scarlet letter" in one novel? Grrrr. In "The Old Custom House" he whimpers about how his government sinecure just sucked the life out of him and he couldn't read and work or . . . anything. Then you hit the punch line. "It was not merely during the three hours and one half of my life which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life . . ."

Wussy boy! Anthony Trollope, say what you might about him, sat down at his desk and wrote for TWO HOURS every morning before trotting off to his FULL DAY'S WORK at the Post Office. Bad Hawthorne. No biscuit.

Actual *excellent* Mexican food last night, with G., at a place on St. Mark's called La Palupa. I've never had excellent Mexican before, I don't think. She helped me strategize some more ideas for M.'s job search, and we had a good talk about some teaching ideas and strategies as well.